Thursday, March 12, 2015

The Dalai Lama And A Gaggle Of Chinese Officials Walk Into A Bar . . .

Do you
remember that uproarious Monty Python sketch where the Dalai Lama,
played by John Cleese, sits cross-legged in saffron robes in a mountaintop cave and
declares that he won't have an afterlife, throwing into an uproar the
exhausted Chinese Communist Party functionaries who have hiked to the
cave? The officials, played by the other Pythons dressed identically in
Mao jackets and clutching little red books, demand that the Dalai Lama
reincarnate, dammit, after he dies, but only on their terms.

"You
have no say over whether you will be reincarnated!" splutters the
official played by Michael Palin. "That is for our government to
decide."

Don't remember the sketch? That's because there never was one.

But
in an astonishing example of Life Imitating Python, or something,
Chinese party leaders meeting this week in Beijing are in high dudgeon
over the 14th Dalai Lama's recent speculation -- think of it as a
cosmic cream pie aimed at the party's collective face -- that he might end his
spiritual lineage as the most prominent leader of Tibetan Buddhism and
not reincarnate. The party has repeatedly warned the 79-year-old holy man
that he must play by its rules-- or else.

The Dalai Lama's obdurance would confound the
Communist government's plans to rig a succession that would produce a
putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China's deeply unpopular presence in Tibet, which it invaded without provocation in 1950.
The Dalai Lama fled into exile nine years later and remains deeply
revered in his restive homeland, which has never accepted -- and never will accept -- the communist
yolk.

Beijing already has rigged a succession following the 1989 death of the 10th Panchen Lama, another senior figure in
Tibetan Buddhism. The Dalai
Lama confirmed a Tibetan boy as the next reincarnation in 1995, but the
Chinese government hid away the boy and his parents and installed its
own choice as the Panchen Lama, a fate that the Dalai Lama has indicated he
does not want.

The
idea of Communist Party officials defending the precepts of
reincarnation and calling the Dalai Lama a heretic, to boot, is deeply
comedic because the party is atheistic to its red core, but beyond the
Python riffs and inevitable late night TV show witticisms, the standoff
is deadly serious. Waves of protests and self-immolations
in Tibet and abroad have repeatedly brought to the surface deep
discontent with the Chinese gulagization, including its attempts to micro-manage Tibet's culture and
control the Buddhist tradition. And Tibetans
are sure to reject any future putative Dalai Lama picked by the Chinese
government.

SORRY TO BURST YOUR BUBBLE, BUT . . .

If Americans were asked what foreign country they most admired but never
visited, doubtless many would answer Shangri La. But since it was
foreclosed in the subprime mortgage meltdown, the second choice probably
would be Tibet. Indeed, the mountainous nation nicknamed "The Roof of
the World" holds a special place in the popular imagination because of
multiple gauzy Hollywood treatments and, of course, the Dalai Lama.

If you don't want to disturb your Richard Gere version of Tibet, move along please. But
with Tibet back in the news because of the reincarnation brouhaha, it is worth remembering
that Tibet's own history is riven with wars between competing Buddhist
sects, sexual exploitation, usurious taxation, serfdom and other forms
of economic enslavement that extended well into the last half of the
20th century; in other words, on the current Dalai Lama's watch.

This does not forgive the Chinese occupation, which has cost well over a million Tibetan lives, the jailing of millions more and destruction of most of the country's 3,000 monasteries, but does
provide some perspective.

And let's face it, the Dalai Lama is who we want him to be: Head of state. Leader of the best known exile movement on earth. Prolific author. Metaphysician. Cross-cultural icon. Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Oh, and caricature, as well.

The apothegems of the Dalai Lama that appear on buttons, bumper stickers
and t-shirts make no more sense "than a single thread taken out of a
Persian carpet, an intricate web, and pronounced to be beautiful,"
writes Iyer, and one of the Dalai Lama's longtime translators shouts to him that
"It's nonsense! All these things you see ascribed to him, others are
just making up!"

Indeed, one of the conundrums that the Dalai Lama faces on his world
travels (he's in Australia at the moment) is that it is the magically esoteric side of Tibetan Buddhism
that is the primary source of fascination for non-Tibetans who want to
turn away from their own religions.

I've always been a worship at home guy, so the contradictions don't bother me, while I'm deeply admiring of the Dalai Lama for his stubborn pacifism. And Tibet has produced some ass-kicking incense as well as a commonsensical pharmacopeia, including a kidney-cleansing compound that may well have saved if not prolonged the life of one of our beloved dogs.

I do have to note that while the 14th Dalai Lama has been moving the world by example
for almost half a century, he has not moved China and now Tibet is
almost gone.

About Me

Shaun Mullen was born to blog. It just took a few years for the medium to catch up to the messenger. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. Mullen was a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has covered 12 presidential campaigns. He is the author of "The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder" (2010) and "There's A House In The Land: A Tale of the 1970s" (2014). Both books are available for sale online in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Much of Mullen's work is archived and can be accessed online in the Shaun D. Mullen Journalism Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.